All Things Digital

Here’s a video I did from a cool party I went to Tuesday night in Santa Monica, Calif., at the offices of ad network optimizer, Rubicon Project.

Organized by Beta South, a networking organization for digital start-ups in the Los Angeles area, it’s an interesting contrast to the frenetic nature of comparable Silicon Valley parties.

In the video, I talk to SoCal techies about the scene there, as well as comparisons to Silicon Valley, including Mike Jones of Userplane (sold to AOL) with Rubicon’s Frank Addante; Peter Pham, who was at PhotoBucket (sold to MySpace) and now BillShrink; and my favorite L.A. Webhead, Gregg Spiridellis of JibJab.

I also contemplate a mutant L.A. strawberry.

Here’s the video:

If we were an actual baby, AllThingsD.com would be just about to walk by now.

Hopefully, we have done better than that over the past year and we hope to do even more in the year ahead, attempting to give readers the very best tech news and analysis married with the high standards The Wall Street Journal is known for.

At the same time, we have also tried to capture the excitement and energy of the blogosphere, in what has been an entrepreneurial effort within a major media company.

The site officially launched on April 26, 2007, one year and two days ago.

No presents, but your presence over the next year, as we make even more improvements to our work-in-progress site.

Thanks, of course, go first to my amazing partner, Walt Mossberg, as well as our crack staff (click here to see them in all their glory), partners, designers and all the many Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones folks involved.

To mark the past year, BoomTown could spend a lot of time deeply ruminating on how blogging is so very different than mainstream journalism (much more fun, much less sleep).

Or I could ponder the agonizing quest to improve standards and accuracy in the blogosphere (”I am I, Don Quixote, the lord of La Mancha/Destroyer of evil am I/I will march to the sound of the trumpets of glory/Forever to conquer or die.”)

Or I could discuss widgets and how they have changed my life (I don’t know what I would have done had Scramble not inspired my empty soul!).

But, no!

Instead, I will just re-post here one of the very first posts I had up on that first day, about…drum roll, please…my worries about the situation at Yahoo (YHOO).

I don’t want to say I am a psychic or anything, but in this piece, called “Terry in Turnaround,” I begin my obsessive coverage of the Internet portal, which I thought a year ago could be headed for trouble.

(Interestingly, my other post that day was about Facebook trying to become more mature.)

Read more »

And, as BoomTown wrote yesterday, so the war of attrition for Yahoo begins.

Not with a bang, but a whimper. And so much whine, I am considering serving up a nice plate of cheese to all players.

But while the first moves by Microsoft (MSFT), which is seeking to take over Yahoo (YHOO), seem a bit weak, it is likely the more significant bombs will start flying next week.

But not quite yet.

First, came a not-so-subtle insinuation from Microsoft Steve Ballmer that he could take his marbles and go home any time.

He noted yesterday in a speech in Milan (Milan? OK, we’ll go with it) that the software giant is “prepared to move forward alone without Yahoo.”

A show of hands of who actually believes this claim, please, a classic go-fish negotiating ploy? No one? We thought so.

Then, comes the artfully worded Wall Street Journal story today, in which it is revealed that some at Microsoft are skeptical of the deal.

Apparently, Microsofties are worried that the job of merging Yahoo into Microsoft will take precious attention away from, well, them!

Well, that’s been the biggest open secret at Microsoft. Almost anyone you talk to notes that the Yahoo deal is risky, but it would be done no matter what due to Ballmer’s determination to use Yahoo to better hammer at rival Google (GOOG).

“This is Ballmer’s war,” said one Microsoft employee to me recently, who also noted that it is still a good move for Microsoft, despite the slowness of the attack. “I doubt he will surrender.”

Well, BoomTown suggested Microsoft do so back in mid-February in a post, noting that Ballmer might do better to use the $41 billion to buy up every hot start-up in Silicon Valley–Digg, Meebo, Slide and even the hopelessly high-valued Facebook–and still have money left over to buy everyone a tank of gas.

The Journal story also listed previously reported names of possible directors for a proxy slate Microsoft must nominate to replace Yahoo’s current board.

They include, noted the story, “former Nextel Partners Inc. CEO John Chapple, former Grey Global Group Inc. CEO Edward Meyer, Jaynie Studenmund, the former chief operating officer of Overture Services Inc., which was later acquired by Yahoo, and former Adelphia Communications Corp. Chief Financial Officer Vanessa Wittman, according to people familiar with the matter.”

Not to be whiny about it or anything, but with no truly prominent Internet executive or figure among these director possibilities so far, BoomTown would have to say we are profoundly underwhelmed by the list.

Thus, we await more powerful forces.

And that might be sooner than later. Microsoft will announce its earnings this afternoon, which–if they are strong and lift the price of Microsoft stock and, therefore, the Yahoo offer–could be the first big gun to fire in the proxy fight.

OK, I like Twitter a lot, but what is up with all this tech news coverage of its outages?

With the Twitter service being glitchy all weekend, for example, the jump-to-the-next-big-thing champ Robert Scoble wrote another piece yesterday smacking his old amour and praising his new love: FriendFeed.

You know, the new pretty young thing in Silicon Valley (ex-Googlers involved make it hotter still!).

You don’t know?

Neither does most of the human race, in truth, which is just getting around to noticing Facebook and maybe, just maybe, figuring out how to properly use a SuperPoke (my advice: never ever!).

And, while Twitter is amazing in many ways, its tech glitches don’t deserve this level of emergency alarms.

But that has not stopped the echo chamber of Silicon Valley from making a lot of really noisy noise about the indignity of it all.

Isn’t there a recent Sarah Lacy interview with some random Web 2.0 player they could egregiously overreact to instead?

In a weird way, though, this reminds me of the outrage when AOL (TWX) went down for 19 hours in August of 1996. (To date myself, I was actually at AOL HQ in Virginia at that very time with CEO Steve Case, working on my first book.)

At the time, AOL’s 6.3 million users had their first collective digital nervous breakdown and the outage resulted in national headlines–as well as later governmental investigations–across the nation.

“If this (outage) is a sign that AOL can’t handle its growth, that’s a very bad message for the professionals that use it,” Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, said ominously to CNN at the time.

Now, 6.3 million users over a decade ago in today’s terms is a lot more in comparison to Twitter’s current users.

But the difference: Today, one single person like Scoble can tweet louder than millions can complain and it sounds like it is exactly the same thing.

While the tech blogosphere fiddles away on navel-gazing stories–Who are the top tech bloggers? Do they Twitter to get to the top? Or do they FriendFeed? Do they feed friends while tweeting? More importantly, will there be chicken wings?–I’d advise anyone interested in the much more serious issue of making some money from Web 2.0 to take a gander at ReadWriteWeb’s piece yesterday on enterprise spending in the arena.

According to a new report from Forrester Research (FORR) the site references in the post, enterprises will spend much more in the coming years on social networking, RSS, blogs, widgets and such, making it a $4.6 billion market by 2013.

Here is an interesting data table from the ReadWriteWeb post (click on the image to make it larger):

Of course, that doesn’t mean that Twitter’s creators should be jumping up and down now that an actual business plan might be surfacing.

In fact, a lot of popular consumer products might not port over to the business market, even if the concept does.

And, naturally, the old grumps in the IT departments loom large over what gets into corporations and what does not, the ReadWriteWeb piece notes, although other enterprise departments like marketing are already enamored with Web 2.0 tools.

Still security and scaling issues remain paramount, and start-ups that have pioneered these apps in the consumer space might lose business to big copycats like IBM (IBM) and Microsoft (MSFT).

I saw real evidence of the shift at an event in Silicon Valley last week, related to Rohit Bhargava’s new book “Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity and How Great Brands Get It Back.”

And, although I expected much more of a corporate love fest, since the affable Bhargava is an SVP of digital strategy and marketing at Ogilvy Public Relations, it turned out to be a very interesting discussion of ways companies could embrace Web 2.0.

I was particularly struck with the very sharp questions from the Silicon Valley-heavy corporate audience too, who were savvy but still curious about the potential pitfalls and benefits of such tools.

Such discussions will be even more interesting, as they percolate across the country to places where most people are just hearing the word widget.

You know, pretty much everywhere except here.

When I was recently in Boston, I had the pleasure of taking Ken Fisher, the founder and editor-in-chief of the tech news and analysis site Ars Technica, to dinner.

Why? Well, to begin, in a crowded sector, Fisher runs a site that has a breadth of deeply techie coverage, original news, a dash of attitude, nice writing, fair analysis and a highly passionate community of serious tech enthusiasts.

And, of course, a totally uber-academic Latin name, meaning the “Art of Technology,” suggested by a quote from the “father of medicine,” Hippocrates:

“Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile,” which is translated as, “Life is short, [the] art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult.”

And, interestingly, the seemingly esoteric tone does not extend to its readership or its writers, most of whom have been drawn from that community.

And while not as well known in the echo chamber of Silicon Valley, the site has long been one of largest in the tech content arena, in terms of both audience and page views and is also one that has been one of the earliest to the table, having started in 1998.

But what’s a relief is that Ars also can cover more viral and perhaps silly tech topics with equanimity, such as its post yesterday on the uproar about the goofy internal promotional video that Microsoft did and which the hair-trigger tech blogosphere treated as a criminal offense.

Wrote Ars writer Emil Protalinski sensibly: “So what’s the lesson here? There is none. Microsoft still likes making fun of itself and people still like making money off of headlines that bash Microsoft. It’s just another day on the Internet.”

If this sounds like a mash note, it is, although Ars is not perfect. For example, it did get into a little trouble in 2006, when a writer did not properly attribute text from IPDemocracy blogger Cynthia Brumfield, but it apologized and then properly linked.

But, because while there is a lot of noise out there, signifying nothing, it is nice to find such a large and successful tech site that does not need to shout to be noticed (like, well, the sometimes I-scream-you-scream BoomTown, for one!)

Or, as Ars Technica gracefully notes in its description of itself: “We work for the reader who not only needs to keep up on technology, but is passionate about it…But at Ars, ‘opinion’ never devolves into dogma; we strive for measured judgments and carefully relayed contexts…It was once said that sine scientia ars nihil est, that is, ‘without knowledge, art is nothing.’ We agree, but there’s also a corollary: sine ars, scientia nihil est.”

Here’s a video (which is hosted on YouTube due to a Brightcove snafu) I did with the soft-spoken and professorial Fisher about Ars, the state of content on the Web, why Ars does not need to be in Silicon Valley and the possible return of the three-syllable word:

Yes, the board of Yahoo is meeting today to try to devise new and more dastardly ways of wringing more money out of Microsoft.

For viewers just tuning in, so far this week on “As the Tiny-Incestuous-Petty-Juvenile-Digital World Turns,” Yahoo (YHOO) has been plenty busy:

An AOL (TWX) mashup deal!

A Google (GOOG) search-ad partnership!

Even–cue the trumpets!!!–the late entrance of that man-about-Silicon-Valley from Web 1.0, Frank Quattrone, working for Google, which is helping Yahoo on AOL (and, fun, snake-eating-itself fact: as a banker, Quattrone worked for Yahoo when it was contemplating buying eBay).

This is so deliciously sweet, in terms of geek soap opera, that I fear I may get a major cavity soon.

But like any hungry viewer, I want more! What, what, what could be the next twist and turn?

Here are three of my more creative brainstorms:

1. Reunite the dream team in United States v. Microsoft to scare the living daylights out of Steve Ballmer.

It will be like an antitrust version of “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” I am almost certain that Joel Klein, Janet Reno, David Boies and the ever-irascible Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson (the latter two pictured here) still are capable of giving Microsoft (MSFT) the willies.

2. If you want make former Yahoo merger partner and now Microsoft merger parter News Corp.’s (NWS) Rupert Murdoch squirm, there’s nothing like adding yet another wizened media mogul to the mix. My No. 1 choice would be some kind of hopelessly complex mashup with the properties of Sumner Redstone (pictured here), who controls both CBS (CBS) and Viacom (VIA). I am thinking something that includes SpongeBob SquarePants and those irksome girls from “The Hills” (also pictured here) and, say, Katie Couric.

3. Of course, the most surefire way to get more money from Microsoft: Hire Mark Zuckerberg (pictured here). So far, the 23-year-old wunderkind and his team at Facebook (well played, Owen Van Natta, well played!) have been the only ones able to get Microsoft to fork over an ungodly amount of money for a chance to own a small part of a hope and a dream and not-a-very-impressive bottom line.

If Zuckerberg can get a $15 billion valuation by putting up only SuperPokes and news feeds as collateral, I would find what he is drinking and get me some for myself.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

We have been remiss in posting our meet-the-VCs-of-Silicon-Valley-if-you-dare video feature, what with all the Yahoo goings-on to keep track of. But we are back with another riveting episode, with guest star Mitchell Kertzman of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

A longtime tech exec, Kertzman is one of the funniest players in the tech sector, and was once the font for all the best jokes about Microsoft, back in the day when no one made jokes about Microsoft for fear of digital defenestration.

Today, Kertzman is actually much more serious, focused on the business-to-business part of the Web 2.0 world, rather than the more popular consumer-facing areas into which most VCs have been pumping oodles of money.

While Kertzman was early into the widget trend–in fact, he was the first to say the word to me at a Demo conference where he was showing off the Widgetbox, the widget directory startup, a moment for which I shall never forgive him–his new focus is on companies like SlideRocket, the online presentation application, and other Web-based productivity products like it.

Yes, I swear, SaaS–Software as Service–can be interesting! Really!

We also liven things up with some chatting about too-high valuations and thoughts on the Microsoft-Yahoo takeover battle, as well as the recession.

Here’s the video of Kertzman:

Earlier this week, I jokingly said Tellme Founder Mike McCue displayed “the cheeriness of someone with acute Stockholm syndrome and $800 million in Microsoft money,” after he was quoted in an Associated Press story about what life was like after a takeover by the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant.

“We are pretty much doing everything we were doing before–just a lot more of it,” said McCue about Microsoft (MSFT) ownership of Tellme, a message squarely aimed at Yahoo (YHOO) CEO and Founder Jerry Yang, who has thus far refused Microsoft’s unsolicited advances.

That prompted the jovial McCue–whom I have know since he was a major tech exec at Netscape, the best known Silicon Valley victim of Microsoft’s aggression–to send me an email inviting me down to Tellme’s HQ in Mountain View, Calif. “I’m pretty sure our captors will allow you to film,” he added.

Well, Patty Hearst of Silicon Valley, you don’t have to ask me twice with an offer like that!

Thus, I headed to Tellme yesterday to make a video at the company, which specializes in voice-controlled technologies and directory-assistance services. When it was sold to Microsoft a little less than a year ago, Tellme was its largest acquisition in Silicon Valley until the recent Yahoo offer that is currently valued at about $40 billion.

Since then, McCue has remained on as Tellme’s general manager and the company still operates as an independent subsidiary in the same funky offices by the CalTrain tracks that I visited eight years ago. It now has 330 employees there.

Here is my video of my visit to its offices and the always sharp McCue talking about living la vida Microsoft at Tellme and about the Yahoo bid (and here is another post and video in which he talks about trends in the voice-automated services business):

Along with my visit to the HQ of Tellme (see my post and video on that here) in Mountain View, Calif., to check out the treatment it is getting as a recent subsidiary of Microsoft (pay attention, Yahoo!), I also talked to Founder and now General Manager Mike McCue about trends in the voice-automated services business.

Here’s the interview, which we did at a lovely Thai restaurant on Castro Street in Mountain View as the trains sped noisily by, where we discuss a wide range of issues about the sector and about Tellme:

After BoomTown broke the news yesterday that top Google exec Sheryl Sandberg was tapped by Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg to be COO of the hot social-networking company, I talked with her and got the usual blah-blah quotes about scaling and growing operations and building a platform and how she wasn’t leaving Google as much as “going to an opportunity.”

But, as loyal readers will find out in the weeks and months ahead, she is sure to make for a much more lively new character in our ongoing and near-obsessive coverage of the Facebook saga, which we at BoomTown HQ like to call “As the SuperPoke Turns.”

It is certainly an interesting bet for Sandberg to make the move from the powerful Google (GOOG) to the upstart Facebook. And whether she wins or loses, it will be fascinating to watch.

But fried as she was late last night when we talked after the big announcement was finally made and deserving of a break, BoomTown will bring you a sassier sit-down with Sandberg after she clears out of the Googleplex Friday after six years (wherein all her rights to unlimited visits to the organic soba latte barista and shiatsu massage therapist will be suspended tout de suite!).

So until then, here are some sizzling tidbits about Sandberg (pictured here, with those soon-to-vanish colored Google exercise balls) to chew on:

The 2007 holiday party where Sandberg met Zuckerberg for the first time was thrown by former Yahoo president and COO Dan Rosensweig, who is close to both (apparently, BoomTown’s invite, where I could have witnessed this historic meeting, was lost in the mail!). Interestingly, Rosensweig himself was someone Zuckerberg probably considered bringing into Facebook.

One plus for the socially awkward Zuckerberg is that Sandberg–who spent her formative years swimming in the shark-infested waters of Washington, D.C., as chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Larry Summers during the Clinton administration–has struck a lot of friendships around the Valley. That includes Google rival Yahoo (YHOO), where her husband David Goldberg once headed up the music efforts. Yahoo President Sue Decker is a good friend, for example.

Sandberg even seems to make nice with VCs (she has to, as her husband is now an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Partners). According to Facebook board member and major investor Jim Breyer of Accel, for example: “I met her in 2001 at the U2 Concert in San Jose. Bono called her name out in front of the whole crowd thanking her for the work she had done with Larry Summers. We (including Bono) all went out for drinks afterwards. Little did I know that it would be a 23-year-old entrepreneur who would finally allow me to recruit her.”

Ah, the sweet ironies of the Valley!

Speaking of which, here’s a video I did in June, with a longish chat with the then-pregnant Sandberg at the start, where we talk about the status of women–or lack thereof–in Silicon Valley.

The occasion was one of Sandberg’s regular gatherings, which she organizes at her home in Atherton, Calif., and which she calls “Women of Silicon Valley.” (Alternatively, BoomTown has dubbed them “ladyfests.”)

The events feature a wide range of speakers, talking to a broad swath of typically high-ranking women technology executives from Internet, software and hardware companies, as well as from other walks of life, about a range of issues. This one was with political pundit and Web diva Arianna Huffington.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Was it just me or did you also get a bit of déjà vu upon reading a story today by the New York Times’s Laura M. Holson about yet another mash-up of a Hollywood talent agencies with Silicon Valley VCs.

That’s apparently what is happening with a new investment venture that includes the William Morris Agency, Accel Partners, Venrock and–filling out the unlikely foursome–AT&T (T), as a limited partner.

The focus of the investment fund will be to hand out cash–and, presumably, expertise–to digital media start-ups in Southern California.

While the Times drilled in on the presence of a big cellphone carrier–just the kind of company that my partner Walt Mossberg has dubbed one of the “Soviet ministries” for stifling innovation with overly controlling behavior in the mobile space–I am more focused on the rocky road of many such deals that have been struck in the past.

Now, I think all the players involved are very smart, including Accel’s Jim Breyer, Venrock’s David Siminoff and also William Morris CEO Jim Wiatt (as well as Morris’s Paul Bricault).

That said, a lot of sharpies have gotten sucked up in the past into the this-has-to-be-a-marriage-made-in-heaven dreams of the perfect Hollywood-Silicon Valley pairing.

Today, there are a number of interesting efforts, such as Comedy Central’s deal with the creators of “South Park” to create a joint-venture digital studio, as well as the better-known pairing of Sequoia Capital with the Will Ferrell-led Funny or Die comedy site (see my video interview with Sequoia’s Mark Kvamme about the site below).

And, of course, although nothing was actually settled, the recently ended writers’ strike was all about content revenues that might–or, perhaps more accurately, might not–be coming from digital sources in the future.

But if the past is prologue, this new group of investors might have to learn to be a bit patient.

Breyer acknowledges as much in the Times’s article. “There is always a fear, I know, that the bubble is about to burst when a parade of actors and actresses comes through my door,” he said, before noting, “this time the discussions are much more rational.”

I guess that is why the funding is in the tens of millions of dollars, the article noted, rather than the larger sums that have been spent in previous attempts to forge these kind of tech and entertainment alliances.

In fact, Holson herself penned a very good piece in 2002 about the failure of one much-touted experiment in such an integration–LivePlanet–between celebs Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and Redpoint Ventures.

That company was supposed to be a multimedia wunderkind, straddling the tech and media worlds with all sorts of gizmo-content wonders. One of its debut press releases in 2000 was, in fact, titled: “LivePlanet Unveils Integrated Media Concept–Entertainment Experiences that Span Traditional Media, New Media and the Physical World.”

Now, it is a shadow of that. According to a January article in Variety about the shuttering of its film unit, “LivePlanet evolved into a satellite company that [partner Sean] Bailey, Affleck and Damon would return to when not engaged in their own projects.”

In the 2002 piece, after a series of problems, including the bust of the dot-com bubble, Affleck himself got it dead right.

”If we stick around long enough and convince people we can do these things, we will matter in the new economy. I’d like to slip to the last page to see how it ends. But who knows.”

And, even six years later, who knows?

Here is the Kvamme video, in which he discusses Funny or Die:

As you can see from this video, BoomTown should stick to poking at Yahoo’s business plans, rather than talking to its very sharp Sarah Lacy of Yahoo Finance’s new Tech Ticker site.

Some material from AllThingsD appears on Tech Ticker from time to time, linking back to our site. And BoomTown was invited to talk about various topics last week with Lacy, including in this post and video about politics in Silicon Valley.

In the piece, Lacy and I discuss the candidates, as well as issues like ubiquitous broadband access (a critical issue about which I have long maintained the federal government has dropped the ball on spearheading the development of, as it has in the past with other important issues such as the universal telephone service or the federal highway system).

While I am not “longing” for former Vice President Al Gore, as the Tech Ticker post noted, it is still true that he is the most techie of any politician in recent memory.

I Obamapolize, but it’s true! (I also Obamapologize for my weird hair and lack of makeup, but I never appear on camera in BoomTown, so I am not going to when visiting Sunnyvale, Calif.)

Also below it is the hour-plus interview Walt Mossberg and I did with Sen. John McCain last May at our fifth D: All Things Digital conference, at a time when he was considered the longest of long shots for the Republican presidential nomination.

So much for predictions!

Stanford University law professor and Silicon Valley copyright-reform guru Larry Lessig bowed out of his consideration of running for Congress for the seat of Democratic Rep. Tom Lantos, who died recently.

In his post on his blog called “On Why I Am Not Running,” Lessig laid out his reasons, noting that such a run had to do with–of course–polls that showed former California state Sen. Jackie Speier would win the district that encompasses a chunk of Silicon Valley.

Nonethless, Lessig said he would continue to focus on his recent effort called Change Congress, which seeks to, well, change Congress.

Here’s his terrific I-will-not-run video:

No, not as the conquering hero of Yahoo yet, but to give a talk to students at Stanford University about topics Gates often focuses on.

In a speech titled “On Software, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Giving Back,” Gates will address the young folks gathered tomorrow afternoon at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium, as well as to a contingent of media. And he will do a question-and-answer session with only students.

A temporarily muted BoomTown will be there, so here’s a shameless offer to any hoodie-wearing student: Free latte to anyone who asks Gates about the Yahoo bid.

Actually, we kid. That’s because Gates actually spoke out on the issue yesterday in an interview with Reuters.

While the software giant’s founder and chairman has taken a back seat to CEO Steve Ballmer in the Yahoo bid, Gates wasted no time in tempering expectations if Microsoft (MSFT) failed in its effort to buy Yahoo (YHOO).

Calling the Yahoo offer “very fair”–uh-oh, maybe the $35-per-share offer is not in the mail–Gates insisted the company would continue to invest copiously in search to try to catch rival Google no matter what.

“We can afford to make big investments in the engineering and marketing that needs to get done,” Gates told Reuters. “We will do that with or without Yahoo.”

But Gates also threw Yahoo a tasty compliment, noting: “But we also see that we’d get there faster if the great engineering work that Yahoo has done and the great engineers there were part of the common effort.”

And that’s got to be worth, in the wise words of J. Wellington Wimpy, at least a few samoleans.

(Completely unrelated factoid, except as it pertains to Wimpy: Gates loves hamburgers too, especially In-N-Out Burger, and has been known to seek the chain out when traveling down south of Seattle.)